Description

ALMA ARGENTINA

GUASTAVINO: Mariana, El Ceibo, Bailecito,
La Siesta, Tres Preludios: El Patio, El Sauce,
Los Gorriones, La Casa, Tierra Linda
GINASTERA: Tres Danzas Argentinas, Milonga
RAMIREZ: Alfonsina y El Mar
GARDEL: El día que me quieras
PIAZZOLLA: Tres preludios, Contrabajísimo

Daniel Levy, piano

EDEM 3414

COMING SOON

Series: The Voice of the Piano
Recording location: Rosslyn Hill Chapel, London (UK)

Booklet Language: English

“In the words of Levy’s charming introductory note ‘like a multicoloured bouquet of wild flowers. It is the kind of music one selects to give loved ones’. There are ebullient pieces here, and dazzling ones, but the prevailing spirit is of a particularly affecting nostalgia. It is, Levy observes, ‘not a simple melancholy, or what might be called saudade or, in Europe, homesickness. It can be compared only with that state known by the German Romanticists as Sehnsucht, nostalgia of the infinite; something remote and intimate that can be perceived but not possessed. At the other extreme, the predominance of a sunny nature resounds as joy and energetic vitality’.

The pieces by Guastavino, Ramirez, Gardel offer the most immediate communion with their roots in Argentine folk music. Ginastera’s Three Argentine Dances and Milonga are in a sense more sophisticated, but this is still echt Argentiniana. It is beautifully played and expertly recorded.

… Comparisons hardly matter with a highly individual collection like Levy’s – and they are likely to seem even more irrelevant when you hear the 18th and last track on his disc, where the pianist’s limpid tone and deliciously indulgent phrasing interweave with the resurrected ghost of Piazzolla himself in a rêverie that is sheer magic”.

Fanfare, USA

“Alma Argentina (“Argentinean Soul”) is the pianist’s musical love letter to his homeland. For aficionados of this material, it is self-recommending, as Levy brings both affection and stylistic rigor to this charming music.”

Fanfare, USA

“The wonderful Argentine pianist has now tackled an exclusively Argentine repertoire through its main authors, where the ‘Argentinity’ only appears within his fluid pianistic discourse as permanent memories, unmistakable to Argentines of course, but of a universal nature… Levy’s diaphanous sound provides the repertoire, so different in itself, a curious homogeneity, from Guastavino’s sweetness to the Ginasterean rhythmic arrogance, from Ramírez’s lyricism to Piazzolla’s brilliant urbanity.”

M.Z. Ambito Financierio, Argentina